In his opening press conference, John Cooper, the Sundance festival director, suggested that one of the outcomes of the austerity now facing the industry is that independent film-makers are choosing to stay native rather than actively courting the mainstream. This goes some way to explaining Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film so far beyond buzzwords such as "ambitious" and "bold" that it stands out like a whirling peyote-crazed medicine man in this year's lineup – which, in the dramatic competitions at least, seem committed to traditional Sundance rite-of-passage tales involving divided families and teenage alienation.
On paper, Beasts shares several characteristics with those movies, telling the story of a young girl named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) who lives in a Louisana shanty town called The Bathtub with her single father Wink (Dwight Henry). The Bathtub has its name for a reason: sited in a dip, the town will be wiped out in the event of a flood. For its first half hour, the film plays like a traditional festival movie, albeit one of the most berserk kind, as Hushpuppy delivers a staccato monologue that reveals snippets of her life and roots. But when the storm eventually comes, the film almost literally cuts anchor. Playing with a very real post-apocalyptic scenario,it follows Hushpuppy and Wink as they try to find home, with the aid of the fellow dispossessed.
But this isn't a downbeat or pessimistic film, rather it is perhaps the first significant eco-threat movie to be seen through the eyes of the generation that has inherited global warming. Hushpuppy is a grass-roots warrior, filthy dirty but intrepid and connected, and inspired by her stern but alarmingly hands-off father.
The main performances, by non-professionals, would be stunning in any movie, but here they are the icing on a strange and eccentric cake. It's a film so completely unique that it's hard to imagine how it was even made. What would a studio executive think of scenes which a child runs through the woods with a Roman candle in each hand, or lights a rusty gas hob with a flamethrower? The equally singular score perfectly matches the dreamlike, did-I-really-just-see-that delirium and goes some way to explaining why Beasts stays in the memory. Whether it will find a wider audience outside of Sundance is another matter, but maybe that isn't important. For now, and perhaps for ever, it will be something magical and secret.
